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Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Loony Pat strikes again.

Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network is off finding gay plots to undermine "family values." This is the sort of twisted thinking of the Christianists. Sure, the whole purpose of the "gay agenda" is so guys can use the ladies toilet! Now from a libertarian perspective the issues the morality mullahs are howling about here are about equal protection before the law, not about anything close to "special rights" or "special privileges". So why does Robertson say that gays shouldn't have the same rights as everyone else?

His answer is shocking. He claims that gays shouldn't have their civil rights because "2% of our population could consider themselves gay or homosexual, and about 1% would consider themselves lesbian. That's it!" Actually that is quite a lowball figure and no doubt as accurate as his prediction of massive hurricanes hitting the US in 2006 -- there were none that year. He said God told him this but apparently God was drinking a bit that night -- or Pat was! So the reason we shouldn't protect the equal rights of people who are gay is because there aren't enough of them. He emphasizes this again later. "There's one thing about having ten, fiftenn percent or twenty of our population being discriminated against, that's a different matter." Apparently there is no such thing as individual rights which apply equally to everyone regardless of what group they belong to or even if they are minority of one. Pat says rights require numbers. If there aren't enough of you tough luck. There are fewer Jews in the United States than gay people. Would Rev. Pat say they don't deserve rights?

And if this premise is true in America is it true everywhere? Born-again Christians are well under 1% of the population in China. According to Pat's numerical theory of rights that would mean that it is perfectly fine for the Chinese government to refuse to grant rights to Chinese Christians.